The invention relates to a cooking appliance comprising a door for closing a cooking chamber of the cooking appliance. The door is lowerable into a stowage compartment in a housing of the cooking appliance. The cooking appliance further comprises a door opening mechanism for automatically moving the door at least in some sections of an entire movement path extending between a closed position and an open position of the door. Furthermore, the invention also relates to a method for opening such a door of a cooking appliance.
In cooking appliances it is known that the actuation of the door and thus an alteration to the position may be provided manually by a user himself, by the user directly gripping the door, in particular a handle, and bringing about the opening of the door by a pulling force. In these embodiments it is provided that the door is effectively moved over its entire movement path by the user himself into the respective positions.
In this connection it is also known that such a door is not only able to be pivoted about a fixed axis relative to the housing but that this stowage compartment is also configured in the housing of the cooking appliance, the door then being able to be inserted into said stowage compartment.
In such embodiments with a stowage compartment, the movement path of the door is relatively complex. Moreover, the hinges required therefor and the corresponding guidance of the movement of the door into the stowage compartment are more complex. Since such a door of a cooking appliance also has a relatively large weight due to thermal requirements and stability requirements, the guidance of the movement has to be designed in this case such that an undesirably hard impact does not occur.
In order to increase the user-friendliness it is also known that such a door may be moved via an electrical drive, independently of the guidance by a user and thus the direct manual movement of the door by a user. Such an embodiment is disclosed, for example, in DE 199 06 913 A1. Here the entire movement path is performed via an electrical drive until the door is fully lowered in the stowage compartment. In this embodiment, however, the electrical drive has to be designed to be correspondingly large and with a high electrical output. This is because with a relatively heavy door forces occur in the movement path which in practice then have to be taken up by the electrical drive in order to be able to guide the movement over this entire path via said drive. Such electrical drives of large dimensions require a large amount of space, a large amount of energy and, therefore, are also very cost-intensive.